My Crash Course on Meteor
26 Oct 2017
They Were Not Joking When They Named It Meteor
Like the name implies and from the meme above, Meteor did rock my world these past two weeks. I took a crash course in Meteor, a client-server application architecture, and while doing so, I did indeed “crash” a couple of times. All puns aside, I definitely learned a lot about creating web applications using Meteor.
Major Dislike
One aspect about running Meteor from my Windows 10 8GGB RAM computer was the load time. Installing and running meteor for a project took me about 10 minutes if I was lucky. If I was not lucky, let’s just say it was faster to update my application than the sum time it took for Meteor to get up and running.
A Few “Crashes”
Being that Meteor was the first full-stack web application framework that I have worked with, I stumbled on a few things. For one, learning about Meteor’s application structure ws a bit overwhelming because it seemed very complex than what I was used to. Meteor applications are structured in a way where there are subdirectories specific for the client, for the server, and for the imports. And within those, can be other subdirectories as well. Another difficulty I found was incorporating MongoDB’s templates and collections into my application.
Easy
I found most of my journey with Meteor to be extremely difficult and long but what made it a bit easier was my background in CSS, HTML, and Javascript. Meteor integrates these languages, uses additional plugins, and is equpped with MongoDb. FlowRouter for one was also a great tool to use because it made routing between different pages definitely easier.
Conclusion
Although I did crash a few times, it was all part of the learning experience. I am still a bit of a novice when it comes to web application frameworks but I could see that Meteor does play an integral role in delivering modern web applications. Its ability to process the current state of my program and project it into my local host amazed me. This experience gave me a glimpse of what real web development would be like and I would not trade it for a thing. Meteor is definitely worth learning!